• Jipeng Song, Ping Yi, Yanlei Wang, Long Gong, Yan Sun, Feng Yang, Xiangsheng Tang, and Mingsheng Tan.
• Graduate School of Peking, Union Medical College, Beijing, People's Republic of China.
• Eur Spine J. 2022 Feb 1; 31 (2): 288-300.

PurposeThe aim of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effects of retropharyngeal steroid use during operation on bony fusion and dysphagia rate after ACDF.MethodsWe searched the electronic literature database of PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library published from January 1990 to February 2020. The size of each group, mean age, proportion of female patients, dysphagia events and fusion rate at one-year follow-up were extracted. RevMan 5.3 was used for the meta-analysis.ResultsA total of eight studies including six RCTs and two case-control studies met the inclusion criteria. This meta-analysis showed that retropharyngeal steroids could achieve significantly lower dysphagia rates (p < 0.001), higher fusion rates (p = 0.01), less moderate and severe events rates according to the Bazaz stratification (p < 0.001). However, there was no significant difference between two groups regarding operation time (p = 0.67), blood loss (p = 0.33), VAS scores at one day (p = 0.90) and VAS scores at two weeks (p = 0.80).ConclusionsRetropharyngeal steroid use is an effective method in reducing dysphagia rate, severe dysphagia rate and increasing fusion rate during ACDF surgery, without increasing operating time, blood loss or VAS scores at one day and two weeks.Level Of Evidence IDiagnostic: individual cross-sectional studies with the consistently applied reference standard and blinding.© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature.

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